March 15, 2012 07:36 PM UTC

Let's Make a Trade!

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• by: Colorado Pols

UPDATE/CLARIFICATION: We added something to the guidelines (after the jump) to clear up some confusion.

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Today is the trade deadline in the NBA, and while professional basketball may not interest you, it got us to thinking about what would happen if you could trade elected officials (insert obvious jokes here).

For example, would you trade Republican Rep. Mike Coffman for Democratic Denver Mayor Michael Hancock? This is a purely political exercise, so don’t worry about policies or ideologies. Think of Democrats and Republicans as two different sports teams, so if they are traded they assume the general ideology of their new party.

In the case above, a Democratic Coffman would let the donkeys gain, and probably hold, another Congressional seat while also taking Coffman out of a potential Senate race in 2014. In exchange, Republicans would get the Denver Mayor’s office, which can be a great bully pulpit and fundraising position (yes, we know that the Denver Mayor is technically “nonpartisan,” but Hancock is absolutely a Democrat). The downside for Democrats is losing control of the city that is the very heart of the state; the downside for Republicans is that Hancock would face a strong challenger for re-election.

Go ahead and propose some theoretical trades in the comments section, and we’ll take the best and most interesting and put them to a vote in a later post; we’ll also post our own mock trades a bit later.

Click to read the guidelines after the jump, and remember: This is a game of politics, not policy. The point of a trade would be to theoretically make your “team” (in this case, your political party) better as a whole and in stronger position to win future elections.

Let’s Make a Trade Guidelines

UPDATE: The political office that the person currently holds goes with them in a trade. If you trade Sen. Michael Bennet to the Republicans in exchange for State Sen. Greg Brophy (an example from the comments below), Bennet is still a U.S. Senator — but he’s now a Republican Senator.

If we need to clarify further, we’ll answer questions from the comments thread with updates to this list.